Josh Spero: My Life As A Teenage Outsider

I had never been uncomfortable being gay; once, when seven or eight, I sat in front of the video and rewound the Levi’s laundrette advert practically until the tape broke. (It was in the ad break, if I recall correctly, of a Tina Turner concert my parents had taped, thus combining two of my consuming passions.) I knew not to do this, though, while my parents were around. Nor did I verbalise such attraction at UCS, though it hardly escaped my peers’ notice, who took time from their busy days parting their hair in curtains to tease or taunt me.

I had gone from a school where I could do dance routines to Bananarama with the girls and be an ersatz grown-up with the indulgent dinnerladies to a school solely populated by pre-teenage boys where campery got you nowhere and no one was interested in talking about the Exchange Rate Mechanism or whatever else I had on the brain that day. I picked up these snippets from my parents’ newspaper and the television news, out of context and hardly understood, but I knew they were things that grown-ups were (in theory) occupied with, and I thought that made them my proper province...

From a rather sweet piece by Josh Spero in Guardian Family.

PS Today's papers are pretty thin gruel, think I'll go to the beach.